Crossers (50 page)

They made the drive in a Dodge 1500 confiscated from a freelancer who’d fallen behind in his mordida, the weapons and gear stowed in a false bottom. Past the great gray artificial mountains built from the tailings of the open-pit copper mines, up over the cerros, with open country spread below, tans and yellows embroidered by the green álamos bordering the Río Sonora. People died out here all the time, vanished as if they’d never been, and the danger enhanced the beauty of the landscape. Without it, it would only be scenery.

Back roads took them through Santa Cruz, then through the gate to Los Tres Encinos. Yvonne, accompanied by the two simians who clung to her side every waking moment except when she went to the bathroom and maybe even then, was already at the airstrip when they arrived. She was wearing her big straw hat, and her shirtsleeves were rolled down against the skin-shriveling sun.

“So that’s her,” Félix said as they pulled up. “Nice ass for an old lady.”

“Don’t call her a vieja where she can hear it.”

They got out of the truck. One of the pistoleros—The Professor recognized him as the one called Marco—patted them down.

“Your boys at the gate already searched us,” he said.

“They might have missed something.”

“You’re looking well, Yvonne. The rest was good for you. How is my friend Billy?”

“Fine, last time I saw him. I have no time for small talk, Carrington.”

He introduced his client from Phoenix, Rubén Gutiérrez. She studied Félix as carefully as a portraitist, mistrust wrestling with greed. The latter won out. Capitalism with the muzzle off, The Professor thought. Greed and fear. She brought them to the ramada beside the airstrip. Marco and Heraclio lifted the steel mat covering the pit in which the coke was stored and opened a plastic fuel drum filled with kilo packages, each marked with the initials or symbols of its intended recipient.

Yvonne removed a bag of her personal stock—the vintner’s reserve, so to speak—and passed it to Félix. “Straight from Colombia, no steps on it,” she advertised, ever the saleswoman.

Félix dabbed a little on his tongue, then placed a little more on his fingernail and snorted it, pronouncing it “excelente, puro.” If it was all this good, he would take a hundred kilos at the earliest possible date. Next week, Yvonne promised, and then they began to talk price. The Professor had encouraged Félix to drive a hard bargain, in the interest of distracting Yvonne. While they haggled, he sauntered onto the landing strip. Slipping a GPS from out of his pocket, he took a reading and marked a waypoint. The almacén stood about two hundred yards beyond the end of the runway and across an arroyo, a big white oblong building easily visible from the air. A few people were standing near it, but at this distance it was difficult to see how many and if they were guards or workers. As he moved for a closer look, Yvonne called from behind him, “Carrington! Where are you going?”

“Nowhere. Checking the condition of the airfield.”

“You can land a jet on it. Come back here. Don’t go wandering around.”

That told him something: she didn’t want anyone near the warehouse; the hostages were still in there. He walked back to the ramada, where Félix, playing his part well, insisted that for so large a quantity he would not pay more than fifteen thousand a kilo. Yvonne finally agreed, but only because she expected a long-term relationship.

A long-term relationship. They laughed about that as they drove out, tailed as far as the ranch gate by a carload of gunmen. About half a mile past the gate, The Professor shifted the Dodge into four-wheel and swung off into a wash, taking it around a bend to where it could not be seen from the road. If Yvonne had any lookouts posted nearby, the surrounding oak trees would hide the car from view. Félix quickly changed into a black jacket and black jeans, slid the truck bed open, and removed his rifle and gear and water jug. He left the bulletproof vest. Too heavy, he said. It would only slow him down. If he did his job right, no one would see him to shoot at him.

“You saw those low hills on the other side of the airfield,” The Professor said, handing him the GPS. “A lot of mesquite, good cover. That’s where you want to be, as close to the almacén as you can get. If you see anything, the hostages being moved, Yvonne going inside, anything, you let me know immediately. If your mobile doesn’t work, use the radio.”

Félix tossed a salute. “Sí, mi capitán. Es como en tiempos pasados.”

“Claro. Like old times. You know, some people would say we are doing a good thing for bad reasons.”

Félix snorted, then shouldered his assault rifle and backpack and slipped off into the brush. In ten seconds The Professor couldn’t see him at all.

I
T WAS PAST NOON
by the time he returned to the comandancia in Cananea. There Zaragoza informed him that he’d secured two Bell 212s from the attorney general. They were now on their way to the Hermosillo airport to pick up the assault team—fifteen federales, his best boys, most of them with military experience. What he did not have was clearance from the Americans.

“United States Border Patrol. Agent Gomez speaking.”

“Where are you?” asked The Professor.

“At a ranch. The Crown A. We’re staying clear of the San Ignacio.”

“The FBI guy is with you?”

“Yeah. Castle is in Tucson with some other FBI people, getting the ransom money.”

“Guess where I just got back from? Yvonne’s ranch. She’s there, the hostages are there, and I’ve got my best man on the ground keeping an eye on things.”

“Wait a minute. You’ve
seen
them? You’ve seen the Erskines?”

“No, but I know she’s got them stashed in her warehouse. We’ve got two helicopters and fifteen agents waiting in Hermosillo for you people to give us the green light. What’s the problem with the clearance?”

“I’ll let you talk to the FBI.”

After a silence he heard a voice that could have been an anchorman’s in some midsize city in the American heartland. “Captain Bonham? This is Special Agent Ralph Inserra.” He enunciated very slowly, assuming The Professor’s English was poor, an assumption he corrected.

“Are you an American?” Inserra asked. “You sound like it.”

“I am some of the time. We need that authorization. We’re ready to go.”

“And I want you to know we sure do appreciate your cooperation.”

“I hear a
but
coming.”

“Yeah. But we’re asking you to hold off till we’ve got the victims released. The kidnappers are supposed to call at five and tell Castle where to drop the ransom. Then, we hope, they’ll turn the hostages over.”

“That might be a thin hope.”

“Here’s the thing, Captain. If this was only a matter of busting a drug boss, we’d say go ahead. Now. But we’ve got the lives of two U.S. citizens at stake. Getting them out, that’s our number one concern.”

The Professor assured him that that was likewise the concern of the Mexican Federal Judicial Police.

“Sure.
Sure
. If it does come to a rescue operation, we’ve got a top hostage rescue team in Quantico. They could give you all the support you need.”

Yeah, The Professor thought. Top team. Like the bozos who fucked up that Waco operation in the 1990s. “Quantico, Virginia?” he said. “By the time they got here, I’m afraid it could be way too late.”

“How long would it take for your helicopters to reach Nogales?” the FBI agent asked.

One hundred eighty miles, The Professor thought. A Bell 212 cruised at one twenty. “About an hour and a half.”

“I’ve already called Washington. We should have clearance within the hour. If you put the birds in the air right now, they’ll be authorized to land before they cross into our airspace. But your people are going to have sit tight at Nogales until the hostages are released.”

The Professor did some more arithmetic. The ransom call at five. Give it at least another hour to make the exchange, if there was to be an exchange. Dusk at seven. He did not want to conduct the raid in darkness. It would be a close-run thing in daylight. He needed to educate this special agent in another mathematical reality. “This drug organization, the Agua Prieta Cartel,” he began. “They’ve got eyes and ears on your side of the line, too. If the choppers take off now, they’ll be in Nogales before three. I’ll have two MexFed helicopters and fifteen MexFed agents hanging around the Nogales airport for three or four hours. We want them there just long enough to refuel and to brief the men. We can’t risk losing the element of surprise. We can’t risk flying in there at night. We want to move
now
.”

“And we can’t risk getting those people killed in a shoot-out between you and those thugs,” replied Inserra following a pause. “Not till we’ve run out of other options.”

“I think you will.”

“Do you know something we don’t?”

“I know her.”

He hung up, the renegade in him prodding him to ignore Inserra’s niggling cautions.

“We will do what they want,” said Zaragoza after The Professor summarized the conversation with Inserra. The comandante did not want to risk losing the hostages, either. It would make the federales look inept, and the federales were supposed to come out looking good, looking glorious. Considering his close working relationship with them, Joaquín Carrasco would want that, too.

“Está bien,” The Professor said. “But the helicopters must not leave right away. Three-thirty. That will get them to Nogales by five.”

“I am going to lead the raid myself.” Yes, of course. Then he would be legendary. Like Comandante Calderoni, captor of Pablo Acosta. “Vámonos, Profesor. Vámonos a Nogales.”

36

I
T WAS ODD
, this anticipation, a queer excitement to it, as if he were waiting to be notified that he’d won the lottery rather than for a ransom demand. Tessa was in the kitchen, wiping counters, straightening cabinets, trying to draw a cloak of the ordinary over the extraordinary. When the phone rang—the kidnappers were prompt if nothing else—she leaped into the living room, where Castle waited with Gomez and the FBI agents. The Mexican police, Castle had been told, were going to rescue Blaine and Monica if that became necessary, take them out by helicopter. Like the Coast Guard plucking stranded sailors from the sea, a basket on a cable, and Blaine and Monica would be lifted up into safety—that was how he pictured it as he put the phone to his ear.

The woman again. “Have you got the money?”

“Yes.”

“You will bring it to the crossing at Campini Mesa. You will leave now.”

He glanced at cues Inserra had written out for him.
DELAY IF POSSIBLE … DEMAND TO SEE VICTIMS …

“I don’t know where that is,” he said untruthfully.

“Then get a map and find it!” Her voice was piercing, like feedback.

“All right. I want to see my cousins. I won’t turn the money over if I don’t see them.” He hesitated a beat. “Alive.”

“You will see them. Alive. Come alone. Don’t do anything stupid. We will be looking for your car. You drive a Chevrolet Suburban. Black with Connecticut license plates. Why haven’t you changed your registration to Arizona?”

She laughed and hung up.

What felt like colonies of ants crawled up Castle’s arms and across his shoulders to the back of his neck. They knew his car!

Inserra removed his headset and played back the voice recording. “What is this Campini Mesa? Where the hell is that?”

“It’s in East Jesus,” Gomez answered. “A kind of unofficial border crossing. Isolated as hell out there. I don’t like it. I don’t think he should go out there by himself.”

“You heard what she said,” Castle protested. “Alone.”

Inserra tapped the headset on the array of the technician’s electronic marvels. “I don’t like it either. Is there any way we can follow him without being seen?”

“No. It’s a mesa. It’s wide open. Flat as Kansas.” Gomez gazed up at Tessa’s painting, hanging over the fireplace. “I can get some of our people to guide yours to set up a stationary in the hills overlooking Campini for ground surveillance. But if something goes wrong, they wouldn’t be close enough to intervene.”

Castle got off the sofa. “I’m going.”

Inserra laid a hand on his wrist and gave him a stern lecture about the risks.

“Do you have the authority to stop me?”

“Short of handcuffing you to a chair, no.”

“Then I’m going.”

“All right. Can’t stop you. But he”—he gestured to his partner—“is going to install an electronic tracking device on your car. A bumper-beeper. It won’t take long, and no one will see it. And have your cell phone on. We might be able to keep tabs on where you are, same way we traced where the kidnappers’ call came from.” He turned to Tessa. “We’ll do that from here, if that’s not a problem.”

She swallowed, bobbed her head in assent.

Gomez shook Castle’s hand, wished him luck, and said he was going to Nogales to meet up with the Mexican police.

After he left, and while the technician attached the bumper-beeper, Tessa flew back into the kitchen to resume her busywork.

Castle went to her and put his arms around her waist. “This is going to turn out all right,” he said with far more confidence than he felt.

She stood on tiptoe to pull a stack of dishes from a top shelf. “All right? How about Miguel? Is he all right? How can you say it’ll be all right? It can only turn out to be less horrible than it is.”

He turned her to face him. She pushed him away and folded her arms and rocked back and forth. “Why do you have to be the delivery boy? They don’t know what you look like. One of those cops could pretend to be you.”

“Tess, they know my car, my cell number. What else do they know?” He was quiet for a time. “I’ve got to go anyway. If I hadn’t yelled out ‘gun,’ maybe nothing would have happened, and—”

“Oh, bullshit! Blaine was spoiling for a fight, and you know it. Go on, go do it.” She looked out the window at his car. “Just come back. Beth came back. You come back. Promise me that.”

“In a couple of hours we’re all going to be right here, all four of us,” he said, and went into the other room for the satchel containing $250,000 in bundles of hundred-dollar bills. It had been quite a scene, collecting the money in the vault in downtown Tucson that morning, the bewildered bank officer looking on as the FBI people crammed the bills into the satchel.

As he drove off, his senses underwent a subtle alteration. He saw dark birds flitting in a tree behind Tessa’s windmill, then realized they were shadows of the spinning blades. The crunching of his wheels on the dirt road sounded louder than it should have, like gravel pouring down a chute. Pulling out onto the San Rafael road, he noticed a man, beside a car pulled off to the roadside, setting a camera on a tripod. He was going to photograph a hawk clinging to a cottonwood branch stretched over the Santa Cruz River. Impossible. It was simply impossible that he, Castle, should be driving to the Mexican border with ransom money while someone else mere yards away took pictures of a hawk. The landscape through which he drove appeared familiar and strange at the same time. His distorted perceptions cast a threatening light, like the yellowing of a cloudy sky before a storm, on the trees, the grasslands, the hills. He felt himself to be in a foreign land where he didn’t know the language or the customs or what to expect next.

He recognized this anxiety—it was the same that had descended on him when he’d visited Ground Zero nearly a year ago. Yet this was not an alien world, it was his own.
Just a different kind of terrorist
, Gomez had said yesterday. The same beast that had devoured Amanda had merely changed its outward shape, its name. Now it had materialized as someone called Yvonne Menéndez. Well, he wanted to look it in the eye without shrinking from it. Touch its flesh. Smell its breath. He wouldn’t be truly free until he did.

A renewed sense of courage and resolve flowed into him as Campini Mesa came into view, wide and empty, the grass coppered by the sun dying over the Patagonias. Heat quivering off the land made the mountains look insubstantial, like mirages. He turned onto a jeep trail, and there, a quarter-mile away, was the crossing. A cattle guard and a gap in the boundary fence and Mexico beyond. He stopped the car and stood on the running board, looking southward. Then he saw a twirling dust cloud and the glint of a windshield.

T
HE
N
OGALES AIRPORT
occupies a broad tableland called Palomas Mesa a few miles north of the city. It calls itself “Nogales International,” as though it were a busy hub of global traffic, but it’s a modest facility consisting of a small terminal, a tower, and a single runway, mostly for private planes.

Near the runway overrun, two black and white Bell helicopters, with their Mexican insignia taped over, were tethered to a refueling truck. Under the curious gazes of the truck driver and an airport worker, fifteen federal policemen, wearing civilian clothes but glaringly obvious nonetheless in bulletproof vests and with assault rifles slung over their shoulders, stood or squatted around The Professor and Comandante Zaragoza, between whom a hand-drawn map of Los Tres Encinos ranch was spread on the ground and pinned at the corners with rocks. As each agent was given his assignment, he snapped to attention and said, “Sí, mi capitán,” or “Sí, mi comandante.” The Professor was rather proud of them.

His biggest anxiety was not for the abilities of his men. It was five-thirty. At best only an hour of decent daylight remained, and now they had to wait for the hostages to be released. Twenty minutes ago Félix had sent a whispered radio message from his lookout post: the hostages had been taken out of the warehouse, put in a truck, and taken away. Where to, he couldn’t say. Nacho answered that question when he pulled into the airport a short while later: Castle was delivering the ransom, and he’d demanded to see his relatives alive first. They were probably being driven to the rendezvous at Campini Mesa. As soon as he got word of their release, the federales would be free to strike and arrest Yvonne on kidnapping charges.

A
GRAY AND RED VAN
rolled to a stop on the Mexican side, about a hundred feet short of the crossing. Castle watched the driver scan the countryside with binoculars. Satisfied that Castle was alone, the driver, his face concealed by a ski mask, climbed out and called, in English, “Bring it over here.”

He all but heard the fibrillations in his chest.
Brrrrit, brrrrit
. “Not till I see them,” he shouted.

The driver opened the rear door. Another man, powerfully built and also masked, emerged, holding a pistol. He yanked Monica from the van, shoved her at the driver, then, waving the gun, summoned Blaine to step out. Blindfolded, handcuffed, and gagged with what appeared to be duct tape, they were dressed as they had been when they’d been seized nearly forty-eight hours ago, Monica in a long, blue nightgown, Blaine in boxer shorts. It was the joy of seeing them alive, it was anger at what had been done to them, it was their pathetic, hesitant, barefoot shuffling on the stony road as the gunman pushed them forward that caused Castle to run toward them, taking the satchel with him.

“Blaine! Monica! It’s me. Gil!”

Blaine twitched his head, made a strangled sound. Castle let go of the satchel. “It’s all there. Now let them go.”

Kneeling on one knee, the driver unzipped the bag and fanned a stack of bills like a card player. “Has to be counted first, and the counting doesn’t get done here.” He stood, languorously, and gave Castle a pat down. “Wouldn’t want you to try calling home,” he said, confiscating the cell phone. He jerked a semiautomatic from his back pocket and pressed the muzzle behind Castle’s ear. “Hands behind your back, asshole.”

Though the mask muffled the voice, Castle recognized it. “You! You!”

Idaho Jim clasped a pair of plastic cuffs around his wrists and pushed him into the van. “Things got a way of coming around.”

“G
ET OVER HERE!”
Nacho hollered.

The Professor interrupted last-minute instructions to his men and walked over to Nacho’s car.

“We’ve got a situation,” Nacho said, waving his car radio’s microphone. “The FBI put some of their people on a stationary to eyeball the drop site. Castle’s been taken.”

“How the fuck did that happen?”

“I don’t know, but it sure does look like the money isn’t all she wants. The FBI guy radioed me a second ago. They’ve got a GPS track on Castle’s cell, and it’s inside Mexico, and so I guess he is, too. And don’t say ‘I told you so.’”

“I’ll say it anyway.”

Without delay he radioed Félix. “They’ve got three hostages now,” he said, pausing between each word because, at this long range, the signal was weak. “If … you … see … them … key … your … transmitter … three times. Key … it … once … now … to … acknowledge.”

He heard the click. A cock-up, he thought, looking at the waning light. A bloody cock-up, that was how his father would have put it. At least the helicopters had spotlights.